No Name

Triggers


Apparently, they've found out who Jack the Ripper was.  Maybe.  At least, so says the Daily Mail, and a bloke who's written a book about the case, and who owns a business selling 'Ripper' tours.  So, reliable and unbiased sources.

Turns out, Jack the Ripper was... some guy.

Who'd have thunk it?

So, will this put a stop to the lucrative Ripper industry?  The books, movies, walks, etc?

No, of course not.  Like all previous unmaskings, it'll just fuel the fire, even if this unmasking turns out to rest on marginally better evidence that some hack's ability to create anagrams, or an evidently untrue story told by a publicity hound, or the baseless hunch of a crime writer, or an obviously forged diary, or the manufactured bad reputation of a dead one-time heir to the throne.

Because, contrary to what everyone ever has always said about Jack the Ripper, interest in the case doesn't stem from the fact that the murderer was never caught.  It stems from the appeal of the degradation, humiliation, punishment and silencing of women... and from the way revelling in this (with whatever spurious self justification) can distract us from other stuff about the lives those women led, and the world they lived in.

Our misogynistic culture is obsessed with the murder of women.  It is possibly the main subject of the present-day Western narrative culture industry, aside from the sexual/romantic conquest of women.

It could be objected that there are so many stories about the murder of women because so many women are murdered... but that doesn't explain, say, the lack of a similar number of stories about the rape of women (as Alan Moore pointed out), or about the political and social subjugation of women, or about any number of other things that are more common.

The prevalence of the actual murder of women is intimately connected with the prevalence of depictions of the murder of women, but in ways that are far more complex than the merely causal (whichever way you want to imagine the causation runs).  It's all part and parcel of a cultural misogyny which stems from sexism and patriarchy, generated by class society all the way back to what Engels called "the world historic defeat of the female sex" with the start of social hierarchy.  (None of which is to excuse our present cultural practice by appeal to the influence of older structures.)

The women murdered (as is supposed) by the man dubbed Jack the Ripper are objects of morbid fascination because they shared a fate which made them only slightly unusual for women of their class and time.  Lots of these women were raped, abused, beaten and/or murdered (by men - let's not efface that vital part of the story).  It just so happens that some of these women were murdered in particularly vicious and gruesome ways, with their bodies mutilated and insultingly displayed afterwards.  (It's by no means clear how many women were the victim of the one escalating killer who ended up reaching a crescendo of perverse cruelty in the killing of Mary Kelley and then vanished, but it does seem likely that at least four were part of his distinct sequence.)

There is a degree of pity attached to the fascination.  Certainly, at the time, many common people in similar walks of life were motivated by fury at the fate of people who they knew, or might have known.  But also at the time, part of the fascination was to do with a kind of furtively aroused moralism about 'unfortunates' (as women who were driven to prostitute themselves by poverty were daintily called).  Such patronising and contemptuous pity is a mixture of fear and loathing of the poor, and of women.  And it puts the focus on sex, safely away from other scarier stuff.

But the fascination with the women is marginal to the wider cultural obsession with Jack the Ripper.  The women are props in his story, used as background detail and as titilation (particularly since the women involved worked as prostitutes, with all the sordid arousal this brings to some).

Generally, the obsession is with the man.  The killer has been fetishized, celebrated, glamourised and bigged up beyond belief.  He has been transformed from a skulking trick into a top-hatted, cloaked, evening-dress-wearing toff with a sinister gladstone bag, riding around in a coach with a royal crest on the side.  Gentleman Jack, the genteel and aristocratic killer.  There's no doubt that part of this - alongside the various attempts to make him a royal, a freemason or a posh establishment figure covering up for Queen, Country and Lodge - is the submerged horror of a system in which the poor, especially poor women, were the playthings of the rich, material to be used when needed and then allowed to sink back into the slum.  But the effect is to transform the killer himself, and his vacuously misogynistic crimes, into a meaningful figure, a powerful figure, a figure of purpose and steely determination, or of glamourous and tortured Jekyll-and-Hydean complexity, an artisan with a philosophy and a moral agenda of his own (however twisted), etc.  In this, the Ripper is the prototypical serial killer of the present-day culture industries, of Seven, Messiah, The Tunnel, etc.  The killer as intellectual, as the isolated thinker with lessons to teach us in blood, as the sinister harbinger of well-thought out rebukes (which shows simultaneously how much 'we' supposedly all need rebuke for 'our' sins, and how evil the opinionated outcasts bringing the rebukes usually are).

(I used to quite like the Gull/Masons theory... but it's only a story, and only a good one when told by Alan Moore.)

The bullshit and the obsession started at the time, with most of the mythmaking about the case being spun by the contemporary newspapers, eager to mop up the profits along with the blood.  The case could be moralised about from every angle except actual, practical sympathy with oppressed women (after all, the only place to go with that was to stop blaming the women and start saying they should be allowed to be safe... which was self-evidently unpublishable radical lunacy).  The case was a litmus test on the moral state of society (the killer brings the rebuke that 'we' all need, in his mad way).  The case was about swarthy Jews and their sacrificial religion, or about all the foreigners (no wonder the Mail loves this latest story - the guy supposedly identified as the killer was a Polish immigrant).  The case was about the degradation of the criminal classes (Punch Magazine, as usual, took the opportunity at the time to define satire as consisting of kicking downwards).  The case was a big joke, jolly London lore.  Hence the newspapers' invention of the name 'Jack the Ripper' when they hit upon the lucrative idea of sending themselves letters written in red ink, purporting to be from the murderer, invoking 'Springheel Jack' in their fabricated signatures, and sniggering about the whole thing in words that were painstakingly badly spelled (because, of course, 'Jack' couldn't be an educated man).

By the way - notice the contempt for the women integral to the name.  He's not murdering people, he's ripping things.  In the name, the women become nothing more than sacks or sheets or dresses.  Remember, when 'Jack' drones on in his letters about how he hates 'whores', he's actually a journalist speaking with the contempt of the respectable for the 'unfortunate'.

All this is a massive distraction.  Was then, is now.  Talk about anything, but don't admit that most serial killers - 'Jack' included - are just squalid, pathetic, inadequate little men who hate women because they take the furious feelings of thwarted entitlement inculcated in so many men by patriarchy, and actually act on them.  We don't want to have that conversation, or miss out on the latest thriller.

And don't admit that hugely more women died in the East End as a result of preventable disease, despair, drink, hunger, domestic violence... in a word: poverty... than died because of 'Jack'.

And don't admit that, as now, the London of 1888, the hub of an empire, harboured bigger mass murderers in the corridors of power than on the streets where the poor lived, worked their lives away, drank, hit each other, stabbed each other, laughed, joked, prayed, fucked for farthings and huddled together for warmth.  And those mass murderers in the corridors of power didn't need to sneak out at night to commit their murders.  They oversaw a system of murder every day, from within those very corridors, from behind their eminent Victorian respectability.  And they still do.

And don't damage the Ripper industry by admitting that there was never any such person as Jack the Ripper.  There was a pathetic and revolting misogynist who probably killed four or five women with escalating hatred and contempt.  And then there was a marketing opportunity.  And - in a society that still runs on drastic inequality, and on the disciplining, punishing and controlling women and their bodies - the market is still there.

Stark Contrasts

Here is the logic:

We live in a society that touts the pursuit of self interest.  That tells people they should look out for themselves.  And yet we also tell people pretty tales about community and cooperation and mutual respect.

Enterprise and initiative... but we're all in this together.

The former ethic is for those who succeed to live by.  The latter ethic is for those who have to budge in together in crowded conditions because, for whatever reason, they have not acquired enough material success to allow them to live the separated, isolated, private, individualistic life of the rich.  The former ethic is for those with a private drive, detached dwellings, grounds, boundary walls and closable gates.  The latter ethic is for those in terraces and flats with cardboard walls and laundry racks on their small balconies.

In short, if you live in a tenement or a housing estate, you must be public spirited.  You must behave.  You must get on with your neighbours.  Your lack of wealth is your own fault; it is itself evidence that you do not have the necessary thrusting spirit of ruthless self-advancement... ergo, you must embrace community spirit because you are so inadequate that you must live in a community.  Those with the necessary thrusting spirit of ruthless self-advancement can leave the graffiti-daubed, dog-shit-smeared romper room of community, and so need not attempt the cooperativeness that their very success shows to be against their nature in any case.

This is, in a roundabout way, a reiteration of the myth of innate and inborn destiny.  It is the same myth that class societies have always told themselves, filtered through the hypocritical bad faith of modern liberalism.

It is not a scripted conspiracy, it is manufactured ideology.  As such, it has all the chaos and contradiction of delusion.  It is believed, even if it is a convenient piece of bunk.  It is applied in a scattershot way, in all sorts of mixed-up and contradictory forms.

The apartheid inherent in it is not seen, is not admitted to, is often sincerely repudiated.  And yet its persistence is tolerated, its expansion promoted.  Nobody, after all, is 'in favour' of divisions between rich and poor.  It's one of those things that everybody formally disapproves of and yet continue.

When the people living in the cramped and dirty corners decide that they will no longer behave themselves, then we see the skull of class society beneath the moisturised, botoxed skin of liberal democratic discourse.

When the poor tear up their hovels, they are ticked-off for damaging their own 'communities' - as though this might not have occured to them, as though they might suddenly realise that they are trashing places that they actually find congenial, as though their behaviour speaks only to their own self-destructive madness and does not suggest that they actually find these 'communities' to be frustrating, grim, tedious, miserable, degraded places in which to be confined.

It is the same as the witless consolation that is offered to the suicidal.  Do not hurt yourself, say people to those who hate themselves.  Do not end your life, say people to those whose lives are miserable.

When the poor steal, they find themselves at the recieving end of the wagging fingers of the liberal moralisers.  Do not do what society constantly exhorts you to do, they are told.  Do not obey the lifelong conditioning of adverts and media images.  Do not consider material goods to be signs of success and status and worth.  Do not long for distraction.  Do not fetishize stuff.  Do not consider consumption to be a palliative.  Not if you can't or won't pay for the privilege.  Do not, in short, be a consumer without feeding your subsistence back into the system of capital circulation.  Do not, says the moralising columnist, obey the instructions that are encoded in every page of this newspaper, in every advert that surrounds my column, in every billboard and commercial and brand logo in the marketplace where this newspaper is sold, unless you can stump up the cash.

Here the two ethics meet in the concept of law.  Be a ruthless acquirer, but be law-abiding.  But the law is written so that 'Community' may be disregarded by those who don't have to live in communities (this being, as often as not, a code word for ghettos, slums and rundown, decaying urban battery farms).  The law is written so that the grand theft of exploitation through the employment of wage labourers is legal, so that tax-dodging is legal, so that obscene wealth is legal, so that the fraud of electoral manifestoing is legal, so that the exercise of influence through wealth over the state is legal, so that the waging of war by the state upon the domestic and foreign poor is legal.  The law is written so that the comparatively minor thefts and cruelties and invasions and abuses of the small fry is its target, its main proccupation.  In short, wealth and power - with all their attendant large-scale vices - are legal.  Poverty - with all its comparatively minor misdemeanours - is illegal... that is to say, it is not illegal to make people or allow people to be poor, but it is practically illegal to be poor.

None of this is to say that poor people don't do terrible things.  They do.  They rob and rape and murder and torture and abuse.  But none of them own media empires that have systematically befouled public discourse, degraded journalistic standards, engaged in wholesale political corruption, stoked racism and homophobia, degraded women, centralised monopoly power over the flow of information to the point of self-satirising absurdity, broken unions, driven down wages, and extracted billions of pounds and dollars of surplus from the labour of workers.  None of them have taken the decision to carpet bomb civillian population centres.  None of them have organised the ethnic cleansing, brutalisation, immiseration, systematic humiliation, mass-murder and apartheid-style tyrannizing of the Palestinians.

In short, poor people are not the problem, any more than black people (or black 'culture') is the problem.  Most of the misery of the world is down to rich white blokes.

The comparison is beyond comparison, especially when you take into account the fact that the obscene pinnacles of wealth in the world - wealth which allows and propels some to commit such incomparably worse crimes - are created by the vampiric extraction which creates swathes of poverty, alienation and frustration in the first place.

The system creates poverty and needs poverty and fosters poverty.  Where would the system be without a reserve army of unemployed to act as a disciplining factor upon those allowed to work?  In any case, most poor people are not unemployed.  Where would the system be without labour that it can use for the creation of profits and then requite at a bare minimum much lower than the profits the labour has created?  Where would the system be without the entirely unrequited domestic labour of mothers who raise the next generations of workers?  This is the extraction of surplus from those at the bottom and its redistribution upwards.  This is the trickle-up effect.  This is capitalism, and it made the sinkholes and urban warzones that now erupt in protest, anger, alienation and opportunistic consumption.

David Harvey:

...the problem is that we live in a society where capitalism itself has become rampantly feral. Feral politicians cheat on their expenses, feral bankers plunder the public purse for all its worth, CEOs, hedge fund operators and private equity geniuses loot the world of wealth, telephone and credit card companies load mysterious charges on everyone’s bills, shopkeepers price gouge, and, at the drop of a hat swindlers and scam artists get to practice three-card monte right up into the highest echelons of the corporate and political world. 

A political economy of mass dispossession, of predatory practices to the point of daylight robbery, particularly of the poor and the vulnerable, the unsophisticated and the legally unprotected, has become the order of the day. Does anyone believe it is possible to find an honest capitalist, an honest banker, an honest politician, an honest shopkeeper or an honest police commisioner any more? Yes, they do exist. But only as a minority that everyone else regards as stupid. Get smart. Get Easy Profits. Defraud and steal! The odds of getting caught are low. And in any case there are plenty of ways to shield personal wealth from the costs of corporate malfeasance.

What I say may sound shocking. Most of us don’t see it because we don’t want to. Certainly no politician dare say it and the press would only print it to heap scorn upon the sayer. But my guess is that every street rioter knows exactly what I mean. They are only doing what everyone else is doing, though in a different way – more blatently and visibly in the streets. Thatcherism unchained the feral instincts of capitalism (the “animal spirits” of the entreprenuer they coyly named it) and nothing has transpired to curb them since. Slash and burn is now openly the motto of the ruling classes pretty much everywhere.

This is the new normal in which we live. This is what the next grand commission of enquiry should address. Everyone, not just the rioters, should be held to account. Feral capitalism should be put on trial for crimes against humanity as well as for crimes against nature.
Sadly, this is what these mindless rioters cannot see or demand. Everything conspires to prevent us from seeing and demanding it also. This is why political power so hastily dons the robes of superior morality and unctuous reason so that no one might see it as so nakedly corrupt and stupidly irrational.

How can the system condemn those who have the enterprise and initiative to go out and take what they want?  How can it frown upon their opportunistic consumption?  After all, these are the values that the system claims to praise.  Who is a more self-reliant, self-helping, enterprising, utility-maximising rational actor than the looter?

Here, again, the concept of law steps in to discriminate between the laudable ruthless and selfish violence of the wealthy and the powerful (their very success being their own alibi) and the sometimes ruthless and selfish violence of the poor, which must be condemned, which must also be decontextualised, the misery and frustration and alienation of poverty being no excuse, no alibi, not even any legitimate context.

Oh, and David Starkey is a racist cretin.